Under late capitalism, ‘corporate purpose’ has become a societal battleground. I argue that understanding how corporations pursue purpose requires that we see them not as stable entities guided by solitary aims, but as complex communication practices continually bound up in struggles over meaning and action. Drawing on a unique combination of Communicative Constitution of Organization and Deleuzian new materialist thinking, I show how authority—rendered as promises of value and claims to property—is the driving force in firms’ existence and operations. Drawing on a study of firms obligated to serve pro-social goals alongside profitability, I illustrate how oversimplifying purpose paradoxically disorders their practices, yet can foster new forms of imagination for both firms and analysts’ engagement with them.